


elegy in c minor.

by akogareru



Category: Original Work
Genre: Elegy, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Original work - Freeform, POV First Person, Poetic, prosetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:00:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29040525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akogareru/pseuds/akogareru
Summary: death leaves no indentation, no silhouette where what used to be no longer is.





	elegy in c minor.

**Author's Note:**

> [ a secret oath. ]

_"madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be  
break-through. it is potential liberation and renewal  
as well as enslavement and existential death."  
  
\- r. d. laing_  
  
  
  
  
imagine your bone structure collapsing in on itself,  
birthday sticks in the mudpie of your flesh  
and eyes like glass, blue as all the oceans and glinting  
as the light curves through them,  
odd little chips of endless third dimension.  
  
imagine as i do,  
these separate features animated. an awkward  
caricature of limbs at impossible bends and intersections,  
levitating in the space between worlds where your half-body  
splinters, the shards of your bones are swallowed  
by the earth and i wake to the familiar sense of  
a gaping, yawning loss.

  
–

  
in our haze of constellations he talks fervently  
of parallel universes, co-existing life forces  
out in secret pockets of the cosmos.  
“the whole complexity of You,  
as a human being,  
existing in multiple dimensions,  
taking different roads through life.”  
  
beneath the blackbird’s feathers of hair;  
dishevelled in all directions like a crown  
of thorns, behind the oceanic eyes his mind is  
unbound,  
unravelling  
and most importantly, free.  
  
a star lost somewhere, careening out of control,  
burning through space in all its blinding brightness.

  
–

  
my greatest sin was  
allowing you to become a part of  
this bleak and inhospitable world  
i have built around myself.  
  
my greatest fear is  
to get so close to ignorance  
that i lose myself completely  
  
and my greatest desire is  
to get so close to ignorance  
that i lose myself completely.

  
–

  
a humid night in mid-July.  
we sit together at the piano in the garage  
of your parents’ house, your fingers poised  
over her ivory keys like Death Angels over  
the Lord’s bones, as though attracted but  
never meant to meet. your breath rattling  
through your body with each inhale. so  
achingly apprehensive, like there are oceans  
and sprawling foreign lands between us.  
  
like you are afraid  
to share something  
borne from the core of you  
with a world that  
holds you so captive.  
  
  
fleeting is the first touch,  
a tangle of notes pure in their discord.  
then, a cacophony.  
  
  
your hands work at the Grand and coax forth  
an adagio of utter melancholy,  
each note ringing lonely into the air,  
and i am trapped in an evening  
four years in the past where you  
played for me the first time.  
  
i think, after all that time,  
that was the moment  
i realised i loved you.  
  
you were eighteen and tugging the moonlight sonata  
from that one hollow in your ribcage you kept  
safely hidden from the world's prying eyes.  
  
you were eighteen and secretly miserable,  
longing for Turtle Days and hay-fever  
and the carelessness of the childhood  
stolen from you.  
  
you were eighteen and surrounded by  
a glass skin, cracked in so many places  
i feared you’d get everlasting scars when it  
finally, inevitably shattered.

  
–

  
in the days immediately following your disappearance  
i think only of you; a torrent of fragment memories.  
  
you, walking on water.  
you, on the borders of emaciation,  
the sharp profound jut of shoulderblades  
achingly delicate beneath blue cotton.  
you, cloaked in thin ethereal whispers of ghosts.  
you, numb and rose-tinted,  
rolling in two-foot deep fields of otherwise  
unblemished snow; a cacophony of laughter  
and limb-twisting, storming alone through  
an amaranthine winter.  
  
in the days immediately following your disappearance  
it is hard not to believe that this is the sea  
rising up in all her terrible, glorious force.  
the sea, swelling with her secret, swirling black abyss,  
the murky darkness in which you reside.

  
–

  
my brother plays on  
through the night,  
beneath me.

  
–

  
sundays run fluidly into one another until suddenly  
each moment becomes a disjointed struggle between will  
and sympathy and some sort of hybrid; a collaboration  
in soulache of disappointment, anger and the guilt that drags  
itself after. a crawling heavy sense on the edge of awareness,  
hauling itself around my neck when i pull myself and all my odd  
sharp angles out of bed once again to face the terrible weight  
clutching hard around my heart, compressing my very bones at  
the slightest touch of you to my mind.  
  
  
and though they all keep telling me “you can’t go saving every  
broken soul”, it crushes me to dust to think of your  
deterioration, the signs i missed as you dwindled away before  
me; how you abandoned the turtles and piano keys for whiter  
shores, that blissful ignorance, the quieting of your mind. how  
you stopped being able to recognise greens and blues and  
yellows; the colours of your one-connected-life, and fled  
towards the white, the brown and back again; caught eternally  
between the two save for those rare, fleeting moments of vision  
not plagued by the haze of other universes in your veins.  
  
  
and your ultimate fall,  
the moment from which i have been hurtling away ever since,  
trekking between valleys of coping and utter desperation.  
  
a guilt festers somewhere  
out of reach inside me for  
my part in your magnificent  
existential catastrophe,  
your complete fall from grace.  
a shadow shaped like you  
that echoes on the streets i walk  
or the rooms in which i dwell.  
  
sometimes  
i think i tire of you and your piano keys,  
those lonely notes i hear  
in the quietness of dawn  
when it's just me and  
the ghosts we share  
awake in a town where  
i was meant to escape you.  
  
maybe secretly, i want you reborn,  
or another opportunity among the many  
i missed to save you from the endless chasm  
your escape routes trapped you in. or,  
to satisfy the sinner in myself  
who wants to follow you there  
without feeling like i have consumed  
the wilted flowers of your once-vibrant spirit.

  
–

  
in July a lot of things happened to us.  
  
we picked blackberries one year, behind Cosmic's,  
and our shoulders were so sunburned  
it hurt to hug eachother goodnight.  
  
we sank our feet into the river at Broad's and watched  
the young girls ride the horses through the fields  
and over the fences to freedom.  
  
(do you remember?  
i cut my feet up real bad in that water,  
and you cursed the reckless teenagers  
we would both later become.)  
  
in July we had our cadence,  
four years after my first sight of  
your true soul hidden away  
behind that delicate glass.

  
–

  
at the piano i sit  
and tentatively, i press the keys  
and hope you can hear me in the cosmos.  
i'm trying hard to show you that i forgive you,  
i really do, and i'm trying to tell you  
that we will forever be turtles,  
on our backs in Cosmic's backyard  
and laughing away the summer.

  
–

  
there are so many things i wish i had said to you.  
  
your hair reminds me of magical midnight,  
and when it sticks up in tufts i think of the  
poor little blackbird whose feathers you stole.  
  
when you smile, i keep count  
of how many times the joy  
reaches your eyes.  
when this happens, i swear  
i could set sail in them.  
  
you gave me my first taste  
of spiritual freedom.  
  
i completely believe that i would  
physically drown if you ever left me.  
  
i think you were supposed to be  
my soulmate, but we got mixed up  
somehow, or something.  
  
i am terrified of what these chemicals  
could turn you into.  
  
you are flawed, but you are also  
the most beautiful thing in my life.  
  
instead, i ride the sea change,  
silent howl,  
and wait for calmer waters.  
  
  
  
  
 _"no existence can be validly fulfilled  
if it is limited to itself."  
  
\- simone de beauvoir_

**Author's Note:**

> [ an unseen courage. ]


End file.
